Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway

EARLY YEARS • Born Ernest Miller Hemingway on July 21st, 1899 • Grew up in Oak Park, Illinois – upper middle class • Hemingway about his community: “Wide lawns and narrow minds.”(The Hemingway Resource Center) • Early outdoor experiences instilled in Hemingway a lifelong passion for adventure and for living in remote or isolated places. • He excelled academically and athletically. He boxed, played football and displayed particular talent in English. • His first writing experience came from his submissions to the school newspaper and the literary magazine. • He did not attend college, instead he wrote for The Kansas City Star.

Hemingway’s Personal Life (cont.) • Rumored that his mother often dressed him in female clothes – overcompensation for hyper-masculinity? • Father committed suicide in 1929, Ernest does the same in 1961 (Idaho) Picnic Fishing Table of Contents

World War I • Against his father’s wishes he tried to join the Army to see action in World War I. • He failed the medical exam; later he joined the Red Cross as an ambulance driver. • Soon after arriving on the Italian front, Hemingway witnessed the brutalities of war. • On his first day, an ammunition factory near Milan blew up. This first encounter with death left him shaken.

World War I • Hemingway was wounded delivering supplies. This ended his wartime career. • He was hit by an Austrian trench mortar shell that left fragments in his leg. • Later he was awarded the Silver Medal of Military Valor from the Italian government for dragging a wounded Italian soldier to safety in spite of his own injuries.

World War I • Hemingway worked in a Milan hospital run by the American Red Cross. • Here, he met Sister Agnes von Kurowsky of Washington D.C. • Although she was six years older than Hemingway, he fell madly in love with her; however the relationship did not survive. • Instead of following Hemingway back to the US, Agnes became romantically involved with an Italian officer. • This experience left an indelible mark. Hemingway romanticized love and war in one of his earliest novels, A Farewell To Arms.

Writing Style • Although he worked at the newspaper for only six months, throughout his lifetime he used the guidance of the Star’s style guide as a foundation for his writing style. (short, direct sentences) • Popular characters in his works: soldiers, hunters, bullfighters, and primitive people. • Themes of his work: Courageous and honest people losing hope in a modern, hectic society • Possibly reflects his own outlook concerning his place in the world • His writing is very dry and descriptive with little plot – draws heavily from past experience

Hemingway’s Professional Life • Wrote forty-nine short stories and published six best-selling novels: • The Sun Also Rises • A Farewell To Arms • For Whom The Bell Tolls • The Old Man and The Sea • To Have and Have Not • A Moveable Feast Ernest Working Table of Contents

Historical Background • World War I (the Great War) began in August 1914 with the assassination of Austrian Archduke Francis Ferdinand. • It was a war against the Central Powers (Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire) and the allied forces of Great Britain, France, Russia, and Italy, and the United States.

Historical Background • The Great War ended in victory for the Allies • The soldiers were involved in a conflict that would change them. • They were more sophisticated and worldly than when they left for the war. • The country was more conservative

Examples of the Conservative Era • The U.S. rejected the Treaty of Versailles shortly after the war • The Eighteenth Amendment outlawed alcohol • The Great Red Scare made many people suspicious that some Americans, especially artists, were communists and/or socialists.

Examples of the Conservative Era • The Ku Klux Klan was founded and was dedicated to attacking African-Americans, Jews, Roman Catholics, and others. • There were legislative restrictions on immigration

Artists’ Responses to the Conservative Era • Many American writers left the country • Hemingway moved to Paris and became friends with people from different social classes, all of whom the war had affected profoundly. • This generation of people hung out at the cafes and nightclubs of Paris, and found traveling enjoyable and important.

Early Works • Hemingway was introduced to Gertrude Stein who served as his mentor and later introduced him to the “Parisian Modern Movement” • This was the beginning of the American expatriate circle known as the Lost Generation. • His other influential mentor was Ezra Pound, the founder of imagism. • Hemingway later said, “Ezra is right half the time, and when he was wrong, you were never in any doubt about it. Gertrude was always right.”

Early Works Ezra Pound Gertrude Stein

Early Works In a Station of the Metro The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. Ezra Pound

Early Works • Two weeks after the publication of The Great Gatsby, Hemingway met F. Scott Fitzgerald. • At first, the two were very close. Often talking and drinking. The two even exchanged manuscripts and Fitzgerald did much to try to advance Hemingway’s career. • Later they became more competitive. • Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda disliked Hemingway from the start. She often described him as “bogus” or a “phony”.

Early Works Zelda Fitzgerald, 1937

Early Works La Closerie des Lilas restaurant • These relationships and long nights provided inspiration for Hemingway’s first successful novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926). • The novel was semi-autobiographical, following a group of expatriate Americans as they traveled around Europe. • The novel was a success and met with critical acclaim.

Early Works • In 1928, Hemingway and Pauline moved to Key West to begin their life together. • Later that same year, Hemingway’s father troubled with diabetes and financial instabilities, committed suicide. • Hemingway was deeply moved by the death of his father. • Hemingway’s next success was the heavy autobiographical success, A Farewell To Arms. The book details the romance between an American soldier and a British nurse.

Key West • Hemingway and Pauline settled in Key West where Hemingway fished the waters around the Dry Tortugas with his longtime friend Waldo Pierce, went to the famous bar Sloppy Joe’s, and occasionally traveled to Spain, gathering material for Death In The Afternoon and Winner Take Nothing. • Over the next nine years, until the end of his second marriage in 1940, Hemingway would do an estimated 70% of his lifetime’s writing in the writer’s den in the upper floor of the converted garage in Key West.

Key West • Death in the Afternoon, a book about bullfighting, was published in 1932 after Hemingway had become an aficionado after seeing the Pamplona fiesta of 1925. • A safari in the fall of 1933 led him to Mombasa, Nairobi and Machakos in Kenya, moving on to Tanzania where he hunted in the Serengeti. • 1935 saw the publication of Green Hills of Africa, an account of his safari. • The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber were fictionalized results of his African experiences. • In 1937, Hemingway traveled to Spain in order to report on the Spanish Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance.

Key West • Hemingway’s active life began to take a toll on his physical condition. • In 1938, Hemingway published the collection The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories. • This collection included some of his most recognizable short fiction such as: “Hills Like White Elephants,” “The Killers,” “Old Man at the Bridge,” and “A Clean Well-Lighted Place”

Key West • For Whom The Bell Tolls was published in 1940. • The book was written in Cuba and Key West. Later the same year, Hemingway divorced Pauline eventually losing his beloved Key West home. He then married Martha Gellhorn. • The novel was based around an American in a foreign land. And again, the novel represented the casualties of war (Spanish Civil War). • The title is taken from a paragraph from John Donne’s Meditation XVII.

Key West “Therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.” John Donne 1572-1631

WWII and so on……. • Hemingway sought to take part in naval warfare for the first time during this war • Aboard the Pilar, Hemingway's crew was charged with sinking German submarines threatening shipping off the coasts of Cuba and the United States • The naval experiences inspired the works The old man and the sea, the garden of eden, and across the river and into the trees • By this point in his life, Hemingway was being dragged down by age and the rigors of bad health and his writing was being accused of being tasteless, stylistically inept, and of bland sentimentality. • Hemingway observed the D-Day invasion from the water.

Later Years • Hemingway married his fourth wife, Mary, a war correspondent he met overseas. • After the war, Hemingway wrote about the sea. The first writings were published as The Old Man and the Sea in 1952.

Later Years Gregorio Fuentes • Some believe Hemingway’s inspiration from the “Old Man” was his longtime friend and fellow-fisherman Gregorio Fuentes. • For almost thirty years, Fuentes served as the Captain of the Pilar. • Fuentes died of cancer in 2002 at the age of 104.

Later Years • On a safari he was seriously injured in a plane crash. He sprained his right shoulder, arm and left leg, had a concussion, temporarily lost vision in his left eye and hearing in his left ear, suffered paralysis, a crushed vertebra, ruptured liver and kidney, and first degree burns on his face, arms and leg. • Some American newspapers mistakenly published his obituary, thinking he had been killed. • The pain was so great from this accident (as well as a separate brushfire incident) that Hemingway was unable to travel to Stockholm to accept his Nobel Prize.

Later Years • Hemingway never fully recovered from his injuries. He left his home in Cuba (as Communist tensions were rising) and moved to Ketchum, Idaho. • He suffered from high blood pressure and liver problems. • Hemingway was also receiving Electroconvulsive therapy (ETC) for depression and paranoia. • The results of these treatments was alarming. Hemingway suffered significant memory loss. • Three weeks short of his 62nd birthday, Hemingway took his own life.

Ernest Hemingway